Claus Aranha

caranha@scholar.social

Computers are weird and magical and I love what people do with them.I teach and research at the University of Tsukuba (Japan). EvoComp, Alife, MAS, ICPC. I'm happy to talk shop when it's cool or someone needs help, but I'm here more to make friends.I love games, gamedev, maps, bots, spiders and pixel art. Slacking alt at <a href="https://wandering.shop/@wrench" class="u-url mention">@wrench</a>Brazilian in Japan. Want to see a less EU-US centric fediverse.I generally approve follows if the stuff in your profile passes a vibe check.

Posts

Post #3711345
If you ever ask yourself whether it is okay to "pirate" academic texts (download them from scihub or anywhere else) consider this: Springer just sent me an e-mail offering me a discount to buy the article that me and my student submitted to them last year. A discount... To buy a text that I wrote... Scihub Ahoy! (or better yet, send the author an e-mail asking for a copy. Sometimes you make a friend in the deal!)
Post #2562645
Recently I&#39;ve been chatting a friend who is a CS educator about how we feel about recent technologies (and CS education). In one of our earlier talks I mentioned how this AI moment we&#39;re having is like a &quot;Monkey&#39;s Paw&quot; moment to me. We were invited to do an &quot;interactive talk&quot; with students about technology and society, and this friend suggested using &quot;Monkey&#39;s Paw: the Hidden costs of Tech advecement in Society&quo...
Post #2562643
Huh, this guy is inspiring in quite a few ways. https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20260424/p2a/00m/0bu/019000c
Post #2562641
A researcher colleague from Europe: - I am really interested in this conference in Japan, but I am not sure I can make it because institutions in the EU are very concerned about our carbon footprint. The same colleague: - By the way, I&#39;ve been thinking about how we can integrate &quot;agentic AI&quot; in my research project, do you have any ideas? 🤔 Hmmmmmmmmm
Post #2562640
Yesterday I&#39;ve been thinking about the balance between assuming that people are familiar with niche things, and assuming people are NOT familiar with things. (In a teaching context) Funny enough, there are XKCD&#39;s for both situations: https://xkcd.com/2501/ https://xkcd.com/1716/
Post #2562639
Today I gave a short interactive lecture about &quot;critical technology discourse&quot;. It was really inspiring, and made me want to put more effort in this topic. We first did a guided discussion with the students focused on Social Media, where we defined some useful ideas and argumentative tools for the students to use, and separated the minto topical groups. After that we gave them a second, more (less?) controversial topic to give the same treatment as homework: Space Exploration...